1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to carving accessories and, more particularly, to a vise for holding a workpiece to be carved.
2. Background
Carving is a reductive process; a carver cuts wood away to create something useful or decorative. The principal forms of woodcarving are relief carving and carving in the round. A relief carving is intended to be viewed from one side and so is nearly always carved from a flat board or relatively thin stock. The technique is used for embellishing furniture and wall panels, and for creating nonfunctional works of art. A carving in the round is fully three-dimensional and is meant to be seen from all sides.
Carving in the round involves selecting and setting up a block of wood. The carver affixes a vise to a workbench and then places the workpiece in the vise. The carver uses a variety of carving chisels and gouges to cut away a rough shape of the final design. Smaller tools are then used to refine the shape and set in the detail. The figure may be smoothed using rifflers and fine sandpaper.
Woodcarving employs very sharp tools that are either pushed or driven through the wood. It is, therefore, essential for accurate and safe work that the workpiece be held firmly. Carvers have a range of available devices for holding their work. One of the most common vises for carving is the engineer's vise. The engineer's vise is a metalworking vise employed for woodcarving. The vise uses "soft jaws" since metal jaws will mark the wood unless the work has a waste area that can be gripped in the vise.
Another commonly used vise is the conventional carver's vise. A conventional carver's vise is similar in principle to an engineer's vise but is made of wood. Also, the jaws of the conventional carver's vise are deeper and are lined with cork or leather to protect the work. A single bench screw may be used to hold the vise on the bench. This allows the vise to be swiveled to various angles about the screw.
Neither the carver's vise nor the engineer's vise allow the carver to quickly alter the angle of the work. For both vises, the jaws of the vise must be removed from the workpiece to swivel the workpiece at an angle. To overcome this problem, carver's often use a pivoting clamp. The pivoting clamp includes a pivoting head mounted within a base that allows the work to be set at an angle and securely locked into position. The pivoting head can be fitted with different-sized faceplates to suit the size of the work.
None of these devices, however, permit quick rotation and/or translation of the workpiece. The engineer's vise requires its jaws to be released before the workpiece may be rotated. Moreover, the engineer's vise offers no rotation around the workpiece nor any translation of the workpiece vertically. Like the engineer's vise, the carver's vise requires its jaws to be released before the workpiece may be rotated, and also offers no up-and-down translation of the workpiece. The pivoting clamp permits rotation about two axes, but the angular rotation is limited by the size of the base and the workpiece may not move vertically.
With limited workbench space in many carver's workshops, mounting a vise on top of the workbench may not be an option. Therefore, a carver may often desire to mount the vise to the side of the workbench. When side-mounted to a workbench, the engineer's vise still allows rotation of the workpiece about a single axis if the jaws are released. The carver's vise, however, loses an axis of rotation since the vise cannot be supported in mid-air by the single bench screw. The pivoting clamp becomes extremely ineffective as the angular limitation becomes more pronounced. The pivoting head of the clamp (and, therefore, the workpiece) protrude from the side of the workbench. Thus, the clamp may not be rotated to hold the workpiece in an upright position.